For the Scavenger Hunt #37, I revisited the theme I had used in Scavenger Hunt #32 – the wooden manikins are back!
For the word “Empty”, I wanted a very minimalist image, with the idea of the manikin being in a completely empty room. I wasn’t exactly sure of how to achieve that because I lack a clean seamless white background of that size. But I got the idea of shooting from above on top of our (white) coffee table.
Camera
Pentax K-1 II
Lens
Pentax D FA 24-70mm F2.8
Focal length
70mm
F-Number
F/6.3
Exposure time
1/60 s
ISO
800
This gave me a manikin on a white background with a shadow below it (shadows are important to ground things on a surface, otherwise they’re floating!). I processed it by cropping the white content, increasing the canvas size to give more space to the image (and relying on software magic and a lot of cloning tools to make said canvas increase “realistic enough”), and making the whole image black&white to emphasize the minimalist approach.
The pictures from my fellow Scavengers are here: Empty.
The theme for last week’s 52Frames was “Shoot from Below”. We set up the Christmas tree a couple of weeks ago, and it felt like a good subject to shoot from below – from the perspective of a Christmas gift, maybe?
Last week’s theme was “Wabi-sabi” – I had been procrastinating removing the dried flower from my bromeliad; I finally did it, and I immortalized it in this picture. It’s taken on my kitchen countertop, which has the nice idea of being black enough; there was a reflection that I tried to use, but to no avail; so I went for the fully black background instead.
2022-48 – Animals
And the theme for this week was “Animals”. There was a clear expectation of, well, live animals, but that was not happening on a Sunday evening at 21:00. But, thankfully, I have board games. Somehow I went for a Noah’s Ark theme – because that made me smile. And, interestingly enough, I got two pictures in a row with opposite backgrounds and opposite diagonals!
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Food”. I knew that what we’d order on Friday night would probably be the most appetizing/colorful food of the week, so I took a few pictures, despite not having any kind of natural light, and being too hungry to set up proper lighting. In all fairness, I had setup some Lume cubes on my Platypod, and then I saw I hadn’t put them in the right holes to be able to raise the Platypod, and I ended up shooting holding my camera by hand.
Despite the dire lack of proper light, I’m not too grumpy with this picture – I think I did a reasonable job with colors in post and, while it’s not great, it’s… decent. And that was some very tasty food too 🙂
I haven’t been the most inspired for 52Frames lately, but I still haven’t broken my streak. So, here are my latest submissions. I’m too lazy to add comments, but I made the alt text more visible as captions too to compensate.
2022-40 – Rule of Odds
Three spatulas in a metallic pot over a wooden counter
2022-41 – Shoot through something
Distorted piano keys, seen through a crystal ball that makes them look curved, with black&white processing. The image is very symmetrical.
2022-43 – Black&White Minimalism
Black and white picture of hands in fingerless gloves over a Typematrix BÉPO keyboard, on a black background. The keyboard shows some wear and tear.
2022-43 – Details
Brown and orange butterfly on a white flower, with a blurry green background.
2022-44 – Chaos
Reflections of large trees in calm water ; the blue sky and the bottom of the water interact visually in somewhat eerie way.
2022-45 – Street Photography
A man wearing a hat and a woman sitting on a bench facing the lake. Two covered boats with red buoys are visible on the lake; the city and some trees are visible in the background of the lake. Two cranes surplomb the city.
I will admit: my participation to the 36th Scavenger Hunt was half-assed. I didn’t even submit the whole set – I was missing three; and some of these are, at best, backup shots. That said, I did submit images, and there are one or two that I’m actually happy with – so let’s go! In alphabetical order of submitted words, because why not. All the albums are available on the above link – visit them for more inspired creations around this list!
Bump
Tram tracks are definitely bumpy – not that much when driving a car (and even then…), but definitely so when using rollerblades, a scooter, a bike, or anything else. I may or may not have occasionally tripped on them when walking! The weather was very bright when I took this picture; I tried to compensate with a black&white processing and an abstract-ish composition. Feels pretty weak to me.
Door
Taken a few meters away from the tram track – again, not hugely inspired. Also, that tram was stopped in a photographically-annoying place, there’s a metallic pole on the right of the picture, and the crop as complicated.
Red/Green
For this one, we knew that our images would also be sent to a colorblindness simulation filter. I didn’t know exactly what to do with that information, but I still wanted something that would convey a red/green notion, even if all the colors disappeared. I played with multiple exposures around a trafic light; I wasn’t intending to have the blurred cars in the first place, but my experiments actually went there, and I didn’t hate it. I first took these images as a “proof of concept”, and I wantend to take some more with a bit more intent (… and a tripod), but that did not happen, so… that’s the picture.
Seated is the first picture I took and, for a long while, was the only one I’d submit this round. We went to Stoos at the very beginning of the Hunt, and we spent a significant amount of time going up and down the neighboring mountains in that kind of chair lifts! It was brilliant. This is my favorite picture for this round.
Sign
There was an extra field for the Sign picture to provide an alt text for the description of the image. I’ve been trying to do that systematically for quite some time – this way, I was ready! Here’s what I submitted for this one: “A tree stump with lichen and ivy, seen from the side, with a small metallic sign indicating that it was a Tilia platyphilla, or Sommerlinde (in German), of the Tiliaceae family, growing in Europa. A red brick building is visible in the background at the top of the image, where the tree used to be.”
I’m always sad when trees are felled, but I recognize that it is sometimes necessary. Keeping the sign plate and a fairly large stump felt like a good idea to me – as a kind of a memorial to the tree in question.
Silence
Picturing “Silence” is not easy – but I finally got the idea of using my noise cancelling headphones for that purpose. I hadn’t really planned my t-shirt choice, but it worked out perfectly, especially since Doctor Who has villains called the Silence! I went for a slightly high-key, slightly soft processing to emphasize the idea of calm (because silence is, well, good :P)
It had been three years: last time we were in Essen was in October 2019. 2020 was a fully virtual edition; 2021 still felt too unsafe to go. This year, it felt OK enough, especially since there was a full mask mandate on the fair – we’ll see in the next few days if indeed it was! But in the meantime, it was SO GOOD to be back in Essen for SPIEL. We played a lot, we were ALMOST reasonable on our loot, we’re exhausted – but super happy to have gone 🙂
Now we’re back home… time for a few quick notes of all the games we saw! In order of play, because that’s approximately as arbitrary as I could make it anyway. I’ve been too lazy to add publishers/authors – but I’ve provided BGG links on the titles where available. Also, credit where credit’s due: many of these pictures are my husband’s 🙂 I kept these notes very short because it’s already a very long post; but I’m happy to give more details if you have specific questions!
The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Letters”. I started grumbling because the weather was pretty bad early in the afternoon; it finally cleared up, so I went for a walk with my camera (and my husband 😉 ). My initial goal was to take pictures of Bahnhof Enge, but there’s repair/cleaning works ongoing, so that was not what I wanted for that picture. I took a few more pictures around – I have at least a backup for this image, and we made way to the lake. On the way, I remembered this facade – those are better letters!
I first grumbled because of the tram stop, but the picture I got feels a bit more alive/story-telling that way, so I like it. And when coming home, I realized the “extra credit” for this week was “Cinematic” – I processed a bit more in that direction, and claimed it 🙂
The theme for week 36 was “Golden Hour”, with an extra credit for “Indoor Studio Lighting”. Which was pretty good, because I shot this at a very late hour on Sunday evening 😉 I tried to reproduce the idea of golden hour with long, soft shadows and a yellower tint than I would typically use. This was a very lazy shot, but it did the job. Sad I don’t have a golden-colored watch – it would have been a better pun!
2022-37 – Portrait of a Stranger
The “Portrait of a Stranger” theme is a common one on 52Frames, and probably the one where I’m the most likely to break my streak when it happens on a given year (we got a two-year reprieve in the previous years 😉 ), and I was fully prepared to “cheat” (I’ve done that before!). But, we went to the Hauptbahnhof on that Saturday, and that train just arrived on the track where we surfaced from the underground tunnels. Kismet it was – I took some pictures of the train, and decided to submit this one for that week.
52Frames – 2022-38 – One Light Source
Another lightbox/studio shot for the “One Light Source” theme – but this time I took the time to refresh my paper background (compare with the first picture – it’s much better 😉 I did a bit of origami last week, and learnt that delightful lotus fold; I plopped it in my lightbox and played with a Lume cube until I was happy with the shadow, which I wanted soft, but visible.
This week, 52Frames’ theme was “Edited by someone else” – we had a spreadsheet to sign up, and we could ask other Framers to edit our pictures. I was in Stoos at the beginning of this week, and I was lucky enough to have a few pretty days, during which I captured that image. I sent it to Caleb Levy, who edited the above picture.
I did do more pictures around that area – if you’re interested (with my edits, though, not Caleb’s 😉 ), they’re here: Stoos – August 2022.
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